Chart Of The Day: Labor Force (Lack Of) Participation Or "We'll Just Make It Up As We Go Along"

By now the widely accepted groupthink on the collapsing labor force participation rate, which as we noted last Friday, cratered to a fresh 35 year low of 62.8% which was the main reason for the collapse in the unemployment rate to 6.7% from 7.3% two months ago, is that it was perfectly expected and is largely due to demographics. Sadly this is just another example of goalseeking a real-time variable to "fit" with a narrative of a recovery when in reality there is no recovery for the record 91.8 million Americans who have given up on work entirely and are now out of the labor force. All of this is well-known. What may not be as well known is that every two years the BLS releases medium-term (10-year) projections for the participation rate. The projections include the demographic composition of the population and the LFP rates of different demographic groups, among other statistics. And it is here that we see just how "made up" the narrative surrounding the demographic mea culpa truly is.

Or, a predicted labor force participation rate of 67.2%, or notably higher than the 66.0% as of the report's publication in February 2004.

Where are we now?

Total Civilian Labor Force at December 2012: 155,485, just under 7 million less than was expected (and this with the so-called recovery)

Total Civilian non-institutional population at December 2012: 244,350, or 3 million more than expected.

Net: a 10 million worker delta! Does this mean that, gasp, America's demographic crunch and "Baby Boomers are retiring" meme were unknown just ten short years ago? Apparently yes. Because somehow the 67.2% expected LFP at the end of 2012 ended up being 63.6% and sliding. And the punchline - if one were to use the expected 67.2% LFP rate, today's unemployment rate would be higher than 12%!

Because here is what happened next in subsequent BLS labor force participation forecasts:

In a nutshell: lower, lower, lower as the LFP entirely not in line with forecasts, cratered. But hey, what they know now, namely that Americans can't wait to retire because they have so many 0% yielding savings, they didn't know back then.

And there you have it: when it comes to the Labor Force Participation rate, one can best summarize it by the old maxim: "We'll just make it up as we go along."

The statistical fudging since 2009 is absolutely breathtaking. They are eliminating millions from the workforce with a stroke of a key. The official statistics are so full of lies that it is impossible to use them for economic forecasting or analysis.

The ultimate goal here is to make the citizens of developed countries to mis-trust everything. We are to lose faith in our currency, lose faith in banks, lose faith in our elected representatives, lose faith in our form of govt., lose faith in getting a job, lose faith in education, lose faith in morals, lose faith in family, etc. etc. etc. - the moment they determine we don't have enough trust... that's when they step in to crash all these systems in order to usher in a new form of govt. and control over all aspects of life.

Bingo. That's the ultimate objective. If they wanted to restore any faith at all they would start with a few perp walks. What we got instead was the outright criminal activity by the bankers and our "elected" officials. The fact that there is no accountability for anybody besides the ordinary citizen is a sure sign that they don't give a fuck what we think. They are going to loot the system until it crumbles, and once it does we will find ourselves under the thumb of a one world police state.

Strangely enough, I have a shooting pain on the right side of my neck (caused by sleeping on my arm - not advisable) which has been easing for three days, so I'm definitely NOT going to see a doctor or sign up for ShroomCare or whatever they're calling it these days, but, after reading four articles on ZH this morning, the only comment I can conjure to express my feelings is,

MOAR IPADS!

So, that's it for me. Am I becoming thought-impaired? And then, can I sign up for disability? So much nonsense. So little time.

What about the .22 shells? Why cant I find any 22 shells? Does anyone really want to live in a world void of .22? I think not. Something must be done and congress should address this .22 crisis.. we are doomed..doomed I tell you.

the funny part is the participation rate of the 65 and older crowd has been growing ( though lately flattened). easiest thing to do is just go look at the NILF of the 16-64 crowd. Now at a new record high of 45.5 million. that's right ... 45.5 million not part time , not marginally attached ... nothing. add in marginally attached and part time wanting full time we are looking at over. 50 million. subtract the 4 million job openings ( assuming full time) and we have a 46 million job shortfall. yea we are fucked.

Labor Participation has been redefined by Obamacare as any woman who is currently in labor, or will be in labor, or is planning to become a victim of the birthing process thereby inducing labor.....this includes all woman who are periodically traumatized by a gender induced biological torment called menstruation.

The story below about the world wide shipping tanking 45% in two months shows the true dismal numbers of the chhristmas season. I think 2014 is going to be an acceleration in the hunger games. This shit is serious.

Also, we can note from SGS that M3 growth is starting to fall, just oh so slightly but clearly visibly in the charts the last few months.

Last time it fell was 2008-2010, a very, very, nasty experience. It now seems to be stalling at 5% annual growth and is ticking towards 4%.

They are desperately trying to increase credit, but the market cannot take on more debt, even if it comes for free, because it cannot find enough new productivity to support the debt. The existing productivity appears to have been fully collateralized.

A deflationary collapse is not a very nice thing to experience in a debt based fiat system. Better prepare and hedge accordingly.

There is unlikely to be an economic recovery because all the efforts of politicians, government, central banks etc are focused on saving banks instead of targeting job creation which is the only way economy can recover.

Politicians are best at barking crap. Economic calculations and interpretations are not exactly their strong points.

The true extent of slowdown in the world economy can be judged by the data points which are not subjected to adjustments by the government. Eg. Change in Electricity and Fuel consumption, Ratio of working population to the total population of a country, Miles driven, Baltic Dry Index, Change in commercial Rental Rates etc

This silly meme that the boomers are leaving the workforce can easily be disproven using the BLS's own figures. They simply do not show a significant drop off in the employment of those 55+. In fact, the #'s show that the 55+ age group is the only age group that has seen positive job growth since the Obomber took office.

Huge miss in Jobs numbers with only 74k created vs estimated well north of 200k can not be just dismissed as a blip in the data. Peter Schiff discusses that FED can not really Taper now, there is no real recovery and FED does not have the exit strategy. Gold is waking up to these developments. What if this data is the real state of the economy? Once people will realise how wrong is the expectation about the recovery Gold will go straight up. COMEX data shows that Gold shorts will be in trouble very soon.
Junior miners are finding the bids these days. McEwen Mining and TNR Gold had a very good week and huge short position on McEwen Mining will be driving the price in case if Gold will confirm its break out next week.
http://sufiy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/peter-schiff-gold-dollar-imaginary.h...

Americans can't wait to retire because they have so many 0% yielding savings

Exactamundo. If interest rates had stayed in their 1990s range, I was going to semi-retire at a fairly young age and do some other stuff that was more fun, might still count as work but wouldn't likely pay much. Now, not only are rates zero, but my capital is eaten away by the fed and might be seized by the federales at any moment for my own good. So I continue to pretend to work and they pretend to pay me.

As others have said, when you also factor in lowered wages, insecurity, and underemployment, the real economic numbers are probably in 1930's depression range.

So why do we seem so happy? One and a half reasons. One, we are an extremely wealthy society, we have food and energy and toys up our yin-yang, even with barely half the population working. And the half - we have Bernankebux (now YellenCoin?) gently raining down on us from heaven, so the half of us who aren't working still get to eat, anyway. Call it neo-trickledown.

But there's nobody in DC with anything like the vision to talk in these terms (the fed governors know it, but aren't talking), so they stay up nights making up lies they can tell us instead.

I think DC has come to grips there is no fixing it, and now are just going through the motions and lying to the public to keep the pitchforks and torches away. The trillions thrown at the problem since 2008 has had no effect, now what?

I checked out in 2010, already to move to live as a minimalist in the country\close the IRA and bought some land, to hunt and grow food (soon to be a crime). I am tired of this current and past administrations, the high level of corruption and greed, bailouts for banks, oil companies, crop growers, along with GMOs posion, chemtrails, endless wars, fixed pricing on everything, no real push for alternative fuels, lies, lies and more lies from the top and our broadcast media pumping us full of crap. I doing what i can to starve the system...giving up comfort and NOT working for any company that ends with INC. I am done!..going underground to system D…just cash and barter for the past 3 years and it seems to be working just fine.